


Daniel's Story

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [24]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Business Division, Canon Compliant, Discrimination, Fix-It, Gen, Injury, Mars, POV Character of Color, Psi Corps, Sleepers, Slice of Life, Terrorism, The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, Violence, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 14:03:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10492485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Daniel, a commercial telepath, is assigned to Mars, and gets more than he bargained for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).

2238\. Mars Colony.

            “Welcome to Mars!”

            Daniel looked around. His new “apartment” wasn’t more than a bedshare – one tiny room, with a cot, and nothing else. There was no space for furniture – the door could barely open as it was, and mere inches separated the bed from the walls. A small window over the bed looked out to a cloudless, orange Martian sky.

            His whole “apartment” wasn’t much bigger than a closet.

            “You have to be kidding,” Daniel said. “Where am I to put my clothes?”

            “Most people lift their beds up on blocks. That should give you plenty of room.”

            Daniel raised his eyebrows at the man’s definition of “plenty.”

            “Don’t look at me like that. The gravity is weaker here. You can lift your bed, I know you can.”

            Daniel didn’t have many belongings with him – he’d placed most of his possessions into storage in preparation for the move – but he’d still expected to have more space than he would in a prison cell.

            “And where is the bathroom?” he asked.

            “Down the hall.”

            “We all share a bathroom?”

            “Ten to a toilet.”

            “I thought the company was putting me up in better quarters than this, to be honest…”

            “You Earth types always complain. These are good quarters! Private quarters! You’ve got a window! You’ve got hot and cold water! Look, the door has a lock!” He gestured to the totally inadequate device. One solid kick and the “lock” would go flying off the wall. “And only ten people to a toilet. That’s good living. We Marsies don’t need much to get by.” _Unlike you spoiled Earthers_ , the man thought.

            Daniel paid his month’s rent – in cash – and got to work setting up his room. A flyer on the back of the door explained the colony’s water conservation regulations. Nerio was a relatively new small town, bigger than a hamlet or a homestead, but nowhere near as populous as any of the three major Martian cities, or even as Xanthe Terra, a smaller city located a two-hour train ride away from Nerio, eastwards across the cold, barren Martian landscape.

            When Daniel left the apartment block to find something to eat, he stood looking out beyond the dome at the endless expanse of reddish desert. The sunlight, even at mid-day, was weak, and the lighter gravity made him slightly dizzy. Already, his nose was sore from the dry air that didn’t smell quite right.

            No rain. No birds. No trees. No ocean. Wan and sickly sunlight by day, utter darkness by night. Terraformed or not, he decided, no place could be farther from his native Puerto Rico.

_I’ve been banished to a god-forsaken rock. I’ll never make it._

*****

            Six months passed. At seven thirty in the morning, Daniel arrived at his usual café, one of a chain across the red planet owned by a company back on Earth. Plastic vegetation stood along the inner and outer walls, in a vain attempt at synthetic lush ambiance.

            Every table in the small establishment was already occupied, so Daniel had to wait outside, by the narrow street – still the widest and busiest in Nerio. Since space on Mars was so limited, strangers always sat together, and no seats were ever left vacant. It sometimes made for interesting breakfast conversation.

            After a half hour of waiting, Daniel’s turn for a seat arrived. “May I sit here, ma’am?” Daniel asked, gesturing. “Do you mind sitting with a telepath?”

            His middle-aged tablemate looked up at him and shifted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable. Sitting with a telepath had not been in her morning plan.

            “I would never use my abilities to read your thoughts, ma’am,” Daniel said, reciting the script he’d been taught in school. “I’ve been carefully trained not to pick up on stray thoughts.” He knew to avoid the word “scan” if he wanted anyone to give him a seat.

            He smiled as best as he could, but he still felt like a puppy assuring a homeowner that he was housebroken.

            “I don’t want you sitting with me, no,” she said flatly.

            “That’s quite all right, ma’am,” he lied, “I’ll wait for another table.”

            He gave the seat to the next person in line, a normal, and waited another ten minutes for the next seat to open up. The rejection stung, even after all these years and countless similar rejections. The Marsies, despite their animosity towards Earth, had no more love for telepaths than the people of the mother planet.

            His second table-mate didn’t mind sitting with a telepath. “I’ve worked with your kind for years,” the older business-woman said nonchalantly. She wasn’t interested in conversation, however – only in reading Universe Today and drinking her coffee in silence. Daniel was a bit disappointed, but said nothing. That was life – at least he had a seat.

            He ate breakfast without fuss, even though it tasted terrible. Living on Mars, he missed his mother’s cooking more than ever.  _And his grandmother's!_ Everything on Mars came from a can, processed beyond all recognition and flavor - what he would have given for some  _sofrito_ , some fried plantains, some  _carne guisada_ \- heck, even anything that resembled real pork! The café’s so-called eggs weren’t more than reconstituted yellow mush. The milk had no doubt arrived in powdered form much like the eggs, and his coffee tasted bitter. Even a simple glass of water had a sour, artificial taste to it. Fresh fruit or vegetables were unheard of.

            Perhaps food was better in the major cities, he figured, for a price - but out here, it was barely edible.

            He was almost finished with his coffee when a worker walked into the café, wearing loose-fitting overalls, thick boots and gloves. It was unusual for construction types to frequent the café (whose clientele tended to be more professional), but not too out of the ordinary. The worker seemed nervous. She glanced around as if looking for someone in particular. Her eyes settled on Daniel.

            _I’m going to do it,_ she thought clearly, with a knife edge of hate, _I’m wired with explosives and I’m gonna blow you Earth-loving scum to bits and there’s nothing you can do to stop me._

            Daniel stared. He was casually familiar with the lawlessness of Mars history, inasmuch as school lessons back home had covered it. Mars's first colony had been mostly lost, years ago, when the shockwave of a terrorist's bomb had ruptured the colony’s main dome,[1] the fragile bubble that kept air and warmth inside. Hundreds had died,[2] including – as far as Daniel could recall – the bomber.

            The worker pulled off one of her gloves, and reached into her pocket.

            The detonation switch! Surely no criminally-minded group could be so foolish – twice?!

            Heart pounding in his chest, and without thinking, he jumped up from his seat, knocking over his coffee, the business woman and the table in his haste to reach the murderous woman on the other side of the café.

            His tablemate fell to the floor with a startled scream.

            “ _She has a bomb!_ ” he shouted, trying to act before the construction worker set off the detonation switch in her pocket. He pushed people out of the way in his race toward her. “ _Everyone get out!_ ”

            Heads turned as people tried to register what was happening.

            Not enough time… not enough time…

            He crashed into the woman, tackling her to the floor of the café, pinning her hands behind her back. She screamed.

            “She has a bomb! She has a bomb!”

            Patrons fled for the exits, falling over each other in the mad rush for the door.

            “Let go of me, you mindfucking son of a bitch!” the worker shouted, trying to push Daniel off of her. He didn’t care what she called him, only about stopping her. He kept her pinned to the floor.

            There was more shouting, as people tripped over each other, pushing and shoving and kicking their way to the door. Someone spilled scolding coffee, someone else tripped in it. The plastic vegetation went over in a cascade of fake fronds. The worker struggled, but he held on.

            Mundane police came running in.

            “She has a bomb!”

            “Get off of me! Let me go!”

            Police separated them, roughly. They lifted Daniel off the floor and wrenched his arms behind his back, slammed him into the wall of the café, and someone slapped handcuffs on him. Another officer began questioning the woman. Daniel heard her telling the police that out of nowhere, he had jumped up out of his seat, screaming, and attacked her.

            “Why are you handcuffing me?” he asked the officer, angry. “I just saved everybody’s lives!”

            “Don’t struggle, freak, or you’re getting a boot up your ass.”

            “That woman has a bomb!”

            “He’s crazy!” she shouted. “He’s out of control!”

            With his face pressed to the wall of the café, Daniel couldn’t see what was happening, but he could feel the officers’ thoughts as they reluctantly searched the woman for explosives. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself. The mundane police were never his friends, he reminded himself. They would take anything he said or did as resisting arrest.

            But they’d find the bomb, and then everything would be all right.

            Except… they were letting the woman go. What the hell?

            “She has a bomb!” he shouted. “You can’t just let her go!”

            “You’re coming with us.” The officer who had him pinned to the wall now spun him around and shoved him toward the door.

            “What the fuck?" He cursed at the officers in Spanish, too, for good measure. "You’re just going to let her go? She’s wired with explosives!”

            “You’re under arrest for assault and battery, disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct.”

            Through the adrenaline, realization clicked into place – he’d been set up. There was no bomb – she’d only wanted to cause panic. He looked back at her with shocked disbelief, saw the smugness under her mock injured pride. There were a thousand names he would have shouted at her, had mundane police not had him in their grip, dragging him off to the waiting ground vehicle.

            _I hate this fucking planet_ , he thought.

 

[1] _Midnight on the Firing Line_ (“But I’ll give you points on one thing. We’re alike in one respect. We have experience with sneak attacks. Pearl Harbor, the nuking of San Diego, the destruction of our Mars colony. It’s a long and bloody history. Know what we learned? The sneak attack is the first resort of a coward.”) See also the Official Babylon 5 Monthly Magazine for more specifics on this attack.

[2] _Id._


	2. Chapter 2

            The mundane police charged and booked him. He was read no rights, offered no lawyer. As a telepath, he had no rights, anyway.

            “You have no business booking me. I’m in the Corps! That makes this Psi Corps’ jurisdiction!”

            A swift punch to the abdomen from the larger cop, and choice curse words about the Corps, knocked the wind out of him and taught him the punishment for arguing. EA law be damned, this was Mars.

            “Take those gloves off," ordered the first cop, a bald man in his forties. "We need fingerprints.”

            He refused.

            “Look, mindfucker,” the second cop barked in his face, “either it’s off with those gloves, or we take them off for you.”

            Daniel shrunk inside, terrified, humiliated. They meant it – and they were itching to add “resisting arrest” to the list of charges against him.

            Like most telepaths, Daniel would from time to time have nightmares of being out in public without his gloves. It made him viscerally sick to think of these police officers touching him.

            He didn’t move.

            They pinned him face down over a table and ripped off his gloves.

_Fuck Marsies._

            Then they grabbed his hands and fingerprinted him. Daniel did everything he could to block out the barrage of hate he felt from them. He knew they didn’t really need his fingerprints – all the information they needed was already in the chip in his identicard. Cops on Earth, at least, hadn’t used fingerprints for decades, not since identicards had been invented that could be matched to the holder’s DNA.[1] The Marsie cops were enjoying humiliating him – an Earther, and a telepath. There was a twisted vengeance in it for them, to violate his privacy as “revenge” for what his mere existence supposedly did to them.

            He said nothing. That would only provoke them further, and he wanted to live long enough to be handed over to the Corps.

            After agonizing minutes and more taunting, they finally gave him back his gloves, but he couldn’t put them back on while still handcuffed. They tossed him in a cell that was, astonishingly, even smaller than his “apartment.” There was a small bench built into the wall, and room enough to stand, but not enough space to stretch out his arms.

            He waited for hours. His abdomen ached, and his stomach grumbled with hunger. Finally he was transferred.

            It wasn’t a Psi Cop who came to pick him up, but a staff member from the local office. Daniel found that odd, but he didn’t ask any questions. He was taken to the city’s (very small) Psi Corps office, and locked up in another cell – this one slightly larger, with what passed for a toilet in the corner.

            There was still nothing to do but sit and wait, terrified. His initial relief at his rescue gave way to a new fear – what would the Corps do with him?

            Maybe he would disappear, never to be heard from again. Maybe they would ship him back to Earth. When you went into Psi Corps custody, it was a black box.

            Finally, there were footsteps. He hid his bare hands between his legs. A Psi Cop appeared in view - in his fifties, a little paunchy, and just tall enough not to be short.

            He called Daniel's name. There was no one else in the cell.

            “Yes?”

            “You’ve been here all day?”

            “Since about noon, yes sir.”

            “I just got the report. I’ve been out in the field since the morning.” The Psi Cop held a digital device, and leaned in between the bars of the old-fashioned jail cell. “The mundanes are throwing the book at you, kid.” He tapped his digital device. “Wanna tell me why?”

            It wasn’t really a request. Daniel sighed, trying not to think about his rumbling stomach, and told the Psi Cop what had happened. “How,” Daniel asked, “is it legal to think ‘bomb’ in a crowded café, when you know there’s no bomb at all?”

            “That’s the mundanes for ya,” the cop said. “If they can’t hear it, it doesn’t count as speech. You’re from Earth, aren’t you?”

            Daniel nodded. It was all in his file, anyway.

            “How long have you been on Mars, son?”

            “Six months.”

            “So rule number one, this isn’t Earth. A lot goes on here that would never happen back home.”

            Home. So the Psi Cop was also from Earth. That was a good sign.

            “The Marsies have an undeclared war with Earth, and the Corps has no position on it. We’re strictly neutral, and you can thank the Psi Corps charter for that. Don’t be a hero.”

            “…Right. Yes sir.” The conflict between Mars and Earth was a political conflict between normals, and the Psi Corps charter mandated complete neutrality.

            “Some Marsie telepaths get mixed up in it,” the cop was saying. “I shouldn’t even be telling you about this, but it’s something of an open secret around here. Bad call, if you ask me. They’re only asking for trouble.”

            Daniel nodded.

            “That’s rule number one. Rule number two,” the cop continued, “is the same as rule number one. This isn’t Earth. Do you know how many Psi Cops we have to cover this town and all the hamlets around here?”

            “…No sir.”

            “Two. Just me and Thompson. Rumor has it we have a base out in Syria Planum somewhere, but I’ve never seen it, and they sure as hell never send reinforcements over to these parts.”

            Daniel nodded. Slowly, things began to make sense – the Psi Cop didn't want to be here, either. He must have gotten on someone’s bad side to end up here, in Nerio.

            “Geneva wants us to do the impossible. We have a backlog of cases going back years! The regular police won’t lift a finger to investigate, even the murders. Half the time they’re even in on it.”

            _Murders?_ Daniel thought, with a shudder.

            “Yeah, murders,” the cop was saying, “and yeah, they’re on it, but can I prove it? ‘Course not, scanning’s illegal.” He looked at Daniel’s posture, hands stuffed between his legs, out of sight. He scowled. “They took off your gloves?”

            “…Yes sir.”

            “Assholes. Had my way, I’d kick ‘em all out an airlock, but who’s asking me?”

            Daniel laughed, weakly.

            The cop left, and returned ten minutes later. He tapped his device again.

            “So… about these charges. Back on Earth, some of this might be serious. You tackled a mundane? You’d be in some deep shit. Playing hero, eh? Who do you think you are, William Karges?”

            “No sir.”

            “Damn right. But what’s rule number one and two?”

            “This isn’t Earth.”

            “Good kid.” He unlocked the cell, and came over to remove Daniel’s handcuffs. “As far as I’m concerned, this was just a misunderstanding. We all catch especially strong surface thoughts from time to time… this time she was fucking with you. Mundanes will do that. Just remember, it’s not your war. The Corps is neutral.”

            Daniel nodded, relieved. “Thank you, sir.”

            “No problem. Now get your ass out of here and go home.” Daniel stood, and stretched his limbs. “I don’t need any more damn paperwork.”

            The cop started to leave, but then turned back around. “Oh, and one more thing – and trust me, I’ve lived this long. Whatever they taught you in school about how the Corps was founded, about William Karges and noble self-sacrifice for mundanes… It’s a crock. Don’t kill yourself for them. They’re not worth it. You are.”

            Daniel nodded. “Right, sir, I understand.”

            There was no way to get home other than to walk – but Daniel didn’t mind. He was hungry, exhausted and bruised, but very glad to be alive, and free.

 

[1] [JMSNews, 5/17/1995](http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-15916): “Except, of course, that Earth identicards use genetic fingerprints, which they have access to, and the idea that the ID is forged or a fraud could be dispensed with in, oh, about ten seconds by just checking his DNA against the file.”


	3. Chapter 3

            Daniel returned to his café the following morning, but the establishment had hung a sign:

            “No telepaths served here.”

            Several telepaths in town complained to the management – they told the café owners that they had eaten there for years without incident, and did not find it fair that they should be excluded from the café because of what Daniel had done. And they futilely tried to explain that had there actually been a bomb, Daniel would have saved all their lives.

            The mundanes wouldn’t hear any of it, and threw them out. “The customers no longer feel safe around ‘you people,’” the owner had said, listing off the injuries, real and alleged, that patrons had suffered in the stampede. “We’ve got lots of complaints.” They kept their sign.

            A few mundanes had protested the exclusion as well, but Nerio was a small town – when it came down to it, no one wanted to make waves, or appear to like telepaths “too much.” Within a few days, they all went back to eating there.

            A week after the sign went up, Daniel was having his coffee across the street, at a different café, outside – or what passed for “outside” in a domed city. That morning, his boss and several important people from the company were having their coffee together, but Daniel had to sit across the street and watch the meeting from afar. He was angry, but decided the café didn’t deserve his money anyway. Let them take a long walk without a spacesuit, he mused darkly. _I’m more bitter than this coffee. I hate this planet._

            He thought about what the Psi Cop had told him. They weren’t worth his spit.

            Then it happened again. This time, the would-be attacker was a man in business attire, carrying a black briefcase. He stepped out of a vehicle and walked toward the café, broadcasting clear intent to bomb it. Daniel wondered if this happened regularly, if the locals just got a kick out of screwing with teeps, hoping someone like Daniel would take the bait and they could book him for causing mayhem. Who could tell what Marsies would do?

            _Not my problem_. Daniel sipped his coffee. _Let him find some other teep to be a chump_ , he thought sarcastically. He was smugly congratulating himself on not giving a shit when the blast went off.

            The bright flash came an instant before a boom sounded, loud enough to be physically painful. The shockwave sent him flying from his seat and onto the hard ground. Panic coursed through him, and he found himself glancing upward, not even sure what it would look like from ground level of the dome had been compromised. It took a shocking amount of effort for him even to crane his neck, and a sense of vertigo, of physical disorientation, came upon him as soon as his head ceased moving.

            He found himself aware of sirens blazing, as though from a great distance, and realized that he’d blacked out. Around him, Daniel heard screams – physical? mental? – and an oddly persistent ringing that he couldn’t readily identify. He heard people dying – too many to count, too much and too intensely for him to shut out. Eyes tightly shut, he slammed his hands to his ears, a reflexive motion meant to drown out the ringing, and the screams in his mind. What mental shields he could manage were paltry against the flood of information coming in.

            _Too little. Too late._

            When he finally opened his eyes, the view horrified him. He was surrounded by overturned furniture. Injured people lay in the street, by the café walls, and elsewhere – curled in on themselves protectively, or lying motionless, or making small abortive movements as they tried to sit or stand. Broken glass lay around him in a sea of sharp glitter in the red Mars dust.

            For a disorienting moment, he couldn't distinguish between the pain in his own body, and that from others. It was all a chaotic, screaming, painful blaze. He thought he was on fire. It took him a moment to realize he wasn’t – across the street, the remains of the café were burning. There were more bodies – and body parts – lying where the café used to stand, buried amidst the rubble of collapsed walls. Blood pooled on the sidewalk, spilling out onto the street. He hadn't noticed that before, he realized numbly.

            He looked down at himself – checking to make sure he still had all his limbs – and saw that he, too, was covered with blood. He didn’t know if it was his own or someone else’s.

            _Oh fuck this place_ , he thought.

            Medical teams rushed to the scene. There was still a loud ringing in his ears, and a terrible pounding in his head. Emergency crews put out the fire, and were assessing the structural damage to the inner dome. He watched the medics load the most severely injured patients into transports. He tried to move, but it gave him too much pain, so he lay still, and focused on his breathing.

            Daniel had never felt people die before. For a moment he envied mundanes – they would only suffer their own physical and emotional trauma, and everything else would be second hand. Fragments of the blast victims’ last moments had embedded in his mind, and he’d known some of those people.

            He stared at the broken glass around him, wondering how badly he’d been hit, trying to ignore the thoughts of the wounded around him. He wished he could block it out, but he was in too much pain to focus.

            Eventually he managed to sit up, his back to the “outside” wall of the café. He saw survivors talking nearby, giving eyewitness reports to the police. He couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the ringing in his ears, but he could catch the gist of their thoughts.

            Medics were evaluating the injured. “Hey!” one of them shouted, spotting Daniel, “we’ve got a telepath over here!”

            It suddenly occurred to Daniel that perhaps they wouldn’t treat him, that they would leave him on the sidewalk. He’d heard of other telepaths being left to die, usually the unlucky victims of random acts of violence. There had to be a Psi Corps medical center in Xanthe Terra, right? Or at least in Solis Planum? And didn’t the Psi Cop say there was a base out there, somewhere?

            A medic was talking to him.

            “Hey, hey, can you hear me?”

            Daniel’s ears were still ringing too much to be able to hear him clearly, but he could read the man's lips, and follow his thoughts. He nodded.

            “Can you understand what I’m saying?”

            Daniel nodded again.

            “You’ve got two choices – we can alert the Corps and they’ll take you to a medical center… which to be honest might take a while, or we can give you a sleepers injection and take you to the hospital with everyone else.”

            Now what he was saying was beyond Daniel's lip-reading ability.

            _The fuck?_ thought Daniel. _Unless my ears stop ringing, I won’t be able to understand any of you._

            He desperately wanted to be taken to a Corps-run medical center. He desperately wanted to be off of Mars. He desperately wished he was as far as possible from Marsies. This was no place for telepaths. His abdomen ached badly.

            “Hurry up, we don’t have time here!”

            He chose the drugs. It wasn’t worth dying over.


	4. Chapter 4

            Daniel didn’t feel much of a change in his mind after the injection – he only noticed that he no longer had any idea what anyone was saying to him. He was taken by medical transport to the closest hospital, where a doctor tried to do an evaluation of his condition.

            “I can’t hear you!” he said, gesturing to his ears. “The blast… I can’t hear you!”

            He read the lips of one of the nurses – “you’re on sleepers.”

            “No no you idiots, I know I’m on sleepers, I mean I’ve lost my hearing! Ruptured eardrum or something!”

            They tried to tell him other things, but he had no idea what. They put him under anesthesia.

            He woke up in a recovery room, groggy and unsure of his surroundings. His hearing was fuzzy and muffled, and if there were medical staff walking in the halls, they had no thoughts. He decided he was dreaming, until he remembered what happened. Then he began to panic, and started to scream.

            Everything was jumbled together, his own memories of the bomb going off, mixed with the memories of everyone else who’d been there. There was no filter – he was back in the explosion, with people dying all around him.

            In his panic, he tried to get out of the bed and run away, but his body wouldn’t cooperate, and he fell on the floor. There should have been pain, but there wasn’t.

            Nurses came running, and gave him another injection – this time, a sedative. They lifted him back into bed. He fell asleep in moments.

            When he woke again, it was dark. There was never any moonlight on Mars – the only light in the room came from out in the hall, under the door, and from the computer panels on the walls. He still wasn’t in any physical pain – he figured he must be on intense pain-killers.

            The room, the hospital, the whole town was completely silent. Lying there in the dark, Daniel never felt so deeply alone in his whole life. He had always taken his senses for granted – quiet background noises, and quiet background thoughts. There was always a _presence_ around him, even if he couldn’t distinguish individual minds. Now, he might as have been alone in the void of space – it was terrifying, and it was unnatural.

            He understood that he was injured in the attack, possibly even seriously injured – but that they had to impair him even further in order to provide him basic medical care, that was enough to make him cry. Didn’t doctors take an oath to do no harm? Weren’t they supposed to relieve suffering, not cause it? Why was it so natural, so _automatic_ to mundanes to subject him to humiliation and degradation? And why did they give him sleepers? For their own convenience? Out of a misguided belief that he was a threat to them?

            He realized that mundanes must think that being on sleepers would make him like them. But that wasn’t true – having a sense and losing it, even temporarily, was not the same as never having that sense to begin with.

            He wondered if he made the right decision, letting them give him the injection, and wondered how long it would be until the drugs wore off. Then he remembered that his co-workers were probably dead, and started laughing – if the mundanes hadn’t been such bigots, he would have been sitting in the café with them, and just as blown to bits. It felt wrong to laugh, but somehow, alone in the dark with muffled hearing and no mind sense, and a body full of painkillers, it was all terribly funny. With strong enough drugs in your system, anything could be hilarious.

            He was alive, and they were dead.

            Oh, he mused, the universe was ironic.

*****

            Three days later, they released him. The doctors told him they were able to treat most of his injuries, but he would need follow-up care at a bigger and better equipped medical center. His hearing had partially returned, enough to make out what people were saying – but he would have to see a specialist about that, as well. Telepathically, he still felt nothing.

            Mars was already a god-forsaken red rock to him, but now it was also empty. He passed people on the street, but they had no minds, no souls. When he got back to his “apartment,” he sat down on his bed and called his Corps friends to let them know that he was still alive, and what had happened to him. The shock of what had happened had still not worn off, and even though he’d felt his coworkers die, he couldn’t yet process that they were dead. He wanted to talk to the other telepaths in the company, but they weren’t around to take the call.

            Then he saw a communiqué from human resources. It was a condolence message that had been sent company-wide – and Daniel saw that while he had been in the hospital, the company had held a memorial service for the dead and prayer for the injured, but his name was not listed. Certainly no one from the company had come to visit him, nor left him a message.

            Surely they knew he had been injured, Daniel mused – he had been taken to the same hospital. Was his name left off because he was a telepath? He didn’t want to assume that everything had to do with being a telepath, but it made him wonder. There were no other telepaths named… but perhaps he had been the only telepath injured, and the company didn’t know about him.

            But he hadn’t been into work… surely they must have thought something about his absence? He didn’t know.

            Would it be so difficult, he wondered, for them to do some small act to acknowledge him? Why was this so hard?

            He almost felt guilty for not warning someone about the blast, even after how they’d treated him the first time, but it was hard, given how little they seemed to care about him in return.

            Then he saw there was another message waiting for him – someone from his division was requesting an in-person meeting. He didn’t recognize her name or face, but she wanted to meet with him immediately.

            He looked at the time, and left her a message that he was on his way.


	5. Chapter 5

            When he arrived at the office, the new woman seemed disoriented and exhausted. She told him she had just flown in on a transport that morning to handle the crisis brought about by the tragic bombing, and complained bitterly about the ride. Daniel listened patiently, and politely agreed with everything she said.

            “Yes, ma’am… travel is really exhausting.”

            The new woman was at least a mid-level executive in the company, perhaps even higher. She wasn’t young. She offered him a cup of coffee (which he had to get himself), and then began grilling him.

            “I have some records here which say that last week, you suspected there was going to be an attack, and caused a scene in the café, the same one that was hit three days ago.”

            Daniel wondered how she had obtained those records – from the mundane police? From town gossip?

            “Yes ma’am.”

            “What made you suspect there was going to be an attack?”

            “A woman came into the café, and… well, as you know I’ve been trained not to pick up on stray surface thoughts. I’d never use my abilities to violate another’s privacy.” He winced inside at having to frame his senses as criminal – but the new executive didn’t know him from Adam, and it was always best to be safe. “This woman…” he continued, “she was very angry, and despite all my training, it was impossible to miss that she was very carefully visualizing a plan to bomb the café, with explosives wired to her body.”

            “But there was no bomb.”

            “…No ma’am, there wasn’t.”

            “And you say she was thinking about bombing the café right then and there, not later on?”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            “Don’t you find it odd that someone would… allegedly… broadcast intent to bomb a café when she had no bomb? A future plan, maybe, but not an intent to do so right at that moment?”

            Daniel couldn’t feel the new executive’s thoughts, but he began to have that sinking feeling that he was stepping in a trap.

            “I do grant that it was strange, yes, ma’am.”

            “And then… a few days ago,” she continued, boldly, “there was actually a bomb, and fifteen people were killed, twelve of them from this company. And another…” she glanced at a document, “forty-five people were injured. And you weren’t there.”

            “I was across the street, ma’am,” he said. “The café hung a sign excluding telepaths.”

            “Let’s stick to the point,” she said. “You were across the street, right?”

            He nodded.

            “Outside? In line of sight? This report says you were injured in the blast.”

            So they did know he had been injured. He winced inside, again. “Yes, ma’am.”

            “And so you mean to tell me that when someone actually did walk into the café with a bomb, you didn’t notice his intent?”

            “No ma’am,” he lied. “I was too far away, and focused on something else.”

            She looked at him with skepticism and… perhaps it was a lack of patience. “Daniel,” she said, patronizingly, “I’ll put that down in the report, but I don’t personally believe it, and I don’t think anyone else will, either.”

            “What are you implying, ma’am?”

            “Don’t you agree that it looks suspicious that you would accuse someone of having a bomb when you knew there was none, and then conveniently ‘not notice’ a bomb when there was one?”

            “Are you accusing me of being involved in the attack?” he asked, with horror.

            “There are a lot of telepaths here who sympathize with the resistance,” she said flatly. “You’ve been on Mars for six months, which is plenty of time for you to have met up with them. Oh, I know the Corps says it’s neutral, but no one really believes it. The Psi Corps is involved in everything.”

            “I had nothing to do with the attack, ma’am, I swear!”

            She sighed, and leaned back. “If I had my way, I’d turn you over to the police, but they legally have to hand you back over to Psi Corps, and last week, the Corps just let you walk out of jail without so much as a parking ticket. So that means they’re in on it. Daniel, I don’t know what it is you’re up to, or what it is you think you’re trying to accomplish, but my first duty is to this company, and keeping my employees safe. I’m dismissing you, effective immediately.”

            The full impact of being on sleepers hit him – he really hadn’t seen this coming. The sensation was profoundly disorienting, even more so than the dismissal itself. How did mundanes communicate with one another, he wondered, when they were unable to feel each other’s intentions? He mentally flailed in confusion.

            “…What?! But ma’am, I had nothing to do with this…” he pleaded.

            “Are you talking back to me?” she snapped.

            “…No ma’am.”

            “Good. You’re dismissed.”

            Crushed, Daniel went back to his “apartment” and cried from exhaustion and physical and emotional pain. Now he had no job, and the company thought he was responsible for the bombing. There would be people in town looking for a scapegoat, and a telepath was a perfect fit.

            It would be dark in a few hours – rather than walk to the Psi Corps office, Daniel decided to lock the door and stay in until the morning. He looked at the original flimsy lock, and was glad he’d installed a deadbolt above it.

*****

            “You again?” the Psi Cop said, looking up at Daniel from his desk. “Didn’t I tell you to get your ass out of here?”

            Daniel still couldn’t feel thoughts, but he could see the cop smiling.

            “I’ve got another problem.”

            “Tackle another mundane?”

            “No… I got fired.”

            “What for?”

            “They think I was responsible for the bombing.”

            “Were you?”

            “Of course not!”

            The cop laughed. “Some week you’ve had, son.” Then he cocked his head in confusion. “And why are you on sleepers? We didn’t give you those.”

            Daniel was about to launch into the long and painful story of his hospital ordeal, but the cop stopped him with a wave of his hand. “Never mind, I’ve got it.”

            Daniel collapsed into a chair, relieved that even though he couldn’t feel minds, others still could. Thank God that someone's telepathic senses still worked.

            “Thank you," he said, genuinely. He'd had it up to here with mundanes. "I hate this planet.”

            “Then why haven’t you packed up and left? You’re a business teep. You can go anywhere.”

            “Go where? The Corps placed me here in Nerio. You’ve read my file, haven’t you?”

            “And once you got to Mars, you could have packed up and moved to Syria Planum. This is Mars, no one’s watching. Why didn’t you?”

            Daniel thought for a moment. “Company loyalty, I suppose.”

            “Loyalty to mundanes?” the cop shook his head. “Never do that. They’ll always stab you in the back. The Corps’ your family, son.”

            Daniel nodded. He didn’t really feel like a Psi Corps pep talk. “I take it you don’t think much of us business teeps?”

            “Never said that. I’m serious – how much time and work did you give them? And how long did it take for them to turn on you when you stopped being useful? They only like us when we’re dying for them, like William Karges. That’s why they gave him a statue in Geneva. Hey, you tried. Trouble is, you fucked it up.” He laughed. “Not your week, son. Better luck next week.”

            “I don’t find that very funny,” said Daniel.

            “Oh lighten up. You’ve got to have a sense of humor to survive on Mars.”

            Daniel shook his head. “Something’s still bothering me, though,” he said, leaning back in the chair and looking up at the low ceiling. All the ceilings on Mars were too low. “The company is right about one thing… and that is that it is very strange that someone would walk into a café and think about detonating an explosive when she had none, and then a week later someone would actually bomb the same café. There has to be a connection.”

            “The Corps’ neutral, son.”

            “Yes but… let’s say you did hear there was going to be an attack on the café. What would you do?”

            He shook his head. “Unless they were targeting us, nothing. We’re neutral.”

            “Hypothetically, here’s the plan,” Daniel said. “They want to bomb the company because they don’t like Earth corporations doing business on Mars. Maybe they feel the company discriminates against Marsies in some way. You follow?”

            The cop nodded.

            “They can’t bomb the company offices themselves, because there’s security. So they decide to bomb the café down the street where the executives meet for coffee, and to make the hit during a meeting. Now what’s the biggest risk? Us. Teeps. Business people are sooner or later going to have teeps around.”

            “Right.”

            “So they get clever. They first send someone to the café, thinking about blowing everyone up, making sure there’s a telepath around to notice. And they send someone from the real cell, too, someone who really does want to blow the place up. A teep like me takes the bait and reacts. There’s a stampede for the exits, people get hurt, people who aren’t hurt claim they were – but there’s no bomb, and the teep is arrested. Everyone screams that teeps are dangerous. The would-be bombers put in angry calls to the management, and threaten to sue the café for this or that, and with any luck, the establishment hangs up a ‘no teeps allowed’ sign. And then what happens? They can send in the real bomber whenever they want, and there’s no one there to catch him. Boom.”

            “Yeah, they’re clever. I wish I thought of it myself. Say, son… Ever considered a job in police work? We could sure use some help with the backlog.”

            Daniel laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is inspired by the Crusade episode "The Well of Forever," in which the "normal good guy" captain and his alien pal conspire to (supposedly) one-up a Psi Cop with the following ploy:
> 
> She will intentionally think BOMB!!! in his presence, as if she was really planning to blow up the ship - the Psi Cop will panic and report it to the captain, and then the captain will blackmail him with HAHA THERE IS NO BOMB - BUT UNLESS YOU DO WHAT I SAY, I WILL PRESS CHARGES AGAINST YOU FOR UNAUTHORIZED SCANNING OF A NORMAL!!!
> 
> And as canon is written, this _works_ , because post-Telepath War, under the "new rules," hearing someone yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and running to the proper authorities about the danger, is illegal - if you're a telepath.
> 
> I don't think the new rules are actually _that_ bad - I think this was a lazy _deus ex machina_ to make the "good guy normal" "win" against the "bad guy Psi Cop" - but this is how canon is written. ("Oh no, you've got me!" /leaves sheepishly, head hanging/) Elsewhere even in the same episode it's explained that picking up on surface thoughts isn't technically an infraction (unless someone has it politically in for you). The "new rules," however, are much more burdensome than the old rules, though they are marketed to the normal population as "freedom" for telepaths.
> 
>  _Behind the Gloves_ returns to that episode - and re-writes it from the Psi Cop's point of view - later in the project.


End file.
